story8309.xml

story8309.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-10-02

The sharp shrill of a telephone ring startled me out of bed. ?Hello?? I said vaguely, half asleep. It was my dad. ?Hey, turn on the news. Something really horrible just happened. Check it out find out about some of the details.? I immediately snapped on the TV. I saw huge clouds of bellowing smoke rising from the World Trade Center. My first thought was why in the world was one of the Twin Towers emitting smoke? Was there a fire? Then there was the report that a massive commercial jet full of passengers hit the World Trade Center. Then my next thought was: what went wrong with the airplane?s positioning and communication systems. Then I went to school, mulling over what I had just saw. This seemed so impossible and surreal that the massive impact of the events didn?t hit me until after watching the constantly repeating video clip of the jet flying directly into the side of the trade center for the umpteenth time. To me, when I visited New York 10 months prior, the colossal Twin Tower seemed to steady and strong. They were the last things I thought could possibly topple down and become a pile of rubble.
The day I had anticipated to be a normal school day, had turned into some dream or fantasy that required some time to digest just to justify its mere existence.